internet librarian: levine/cohen on rss

By Liz Lawley on November 4, 2003 5:07 PM

One bonus for me of attending this conference was getting a chance to meet Jenny Levine, the Shifted Librarian! (She's on the same network that I'm using ("Deep Blue Wireless", $8.95/day), so if she had a Mac we could use Rendezvous to share information and collaborate. But she's not. There's an amazingly small number of laptops here, and I've only seen one other Powerbook. Huge change from tech industry conferences.)

She and Steve Cohen are talking about RSS;it's a basic introduction to RSS, for people who aren't familiar with it at all, so I probably won't blog much about it.

Most of the presentations I've seen today, this one included, start with a list of characteristics, rather than showing the functionality first. A list of aggregators at the beginning is less helpful than a list of aggregators at the end. Start with the "why should I care"--then dig into the what and how.

This is the first time I've ever actually seen the Radio aggregator; explains a lot about why so many Radio users tend towards the "link and comment" approach, and often incorporate large verbatim components from the sites they're commenting on.